After 30 months of exclusive use of Linux as my desktop environment, I decided that it was about time to refresh my knowledge of Microsoft Windows and Office. This is not about switching back to Windows. Actually, having used open-source software exclusively for such a long time, I’d say it would be quite impossible to [...]

Until now I have been creating partition images with Partimage, which has never failed. Another very popular tool nowadays is CloneZilla. This software, which happens to include partimage among various other utilities, has wider filesystem support and a better set of features – taking/restoring backups across the network is supported. The fact that this is [...]

Midnight Commander (MC) is a lean, but powerful, two-panel file manager that, admittedly, promotes productivity while working from a console. Among other features, it implements a user menu with pre-defined actions that can be performed on the selected files or directories. This menu can be further customized by the user on a directory-, user- or [...]

Hardware either works or does not work. Two pieces of hardware are either compatible or icompatible. This is the rule. However, when the incompatibility-gap between the two pieces of hardware is small, there is almost always a way to make these two pieces work together as if they were fully compatible. This generally involves the [...]

The Slack World, a Slackware related online magazine has published a very good write-up about how to create a chroot environment. Tom Newsom writes in his article: In this document I shall be showing you how you can run, for testing purposes perhaps, two versions of Slackware simultaneously. Both will be fully fledged installs and [...]

The Red Hat Magazine included an excellent tip about how to lock out a user, if it fails to supply a valid password for a pre-defined number of login attempts. This is implemented by making use of the The PAM module pam_tally. This practice serves as a barrier for those, either human or bots, who [...]

A long time has passed since Fedora 6 was released, many of the initial bugs have been fixed, so I decided to perform an upgrade of the installation on the server that powers this web site. Everything has gone well, despite the fact that a few strange things happened during the upgrade.

pdf2email is a CUPS backend that uses GhostScript to print a document to PDF and sends the final file to the user that requested the print via email. This software is written in Python. I had written this backend a few months ago, it has worked fine for me, so I decided to release it. Your feedback is welcome.

This is a very interesting article that describes in detail all the required actions a sysadmin should perform in order to effectively remove a user from a Linux system. This checklist mainly focuses on security, covering all aspects of the removal procedure, from the user’s documents to mail aliases, cronjobs, user’s processes etc. Read the [...]

Today, I revised my logwatch configuration and I decided to use an external parser for the SELinux audits. Logwatch includes such a parser (/usr/share/logwatch/scripts/services/audit script), but i tend to prefer seaudit-report, part of the setools-gui package in Fedora. Don’t let the package name confuse you, seaudit-report is a CLI tool.